Many people use Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop for designing Web layouts, but a lot of companies use Visio – especially for higer level ‘wireframes’. One of Visio’s problems (<= 2003 anyway) is that it doesn’t support pixel units. This means you’ll always be approximating the sizes of content areas and page elements, making the developer’s job more difficult.

Enter ‘Visio Guy’, and the Pixel Unit Line Shape. This is just a great addition for anyone using Visio. Before you know it you’ll be laying out pixel perfect shapes that the developers will then give you great pleasure in declaring ‘this won’t work in IE6!’ 🙂

A thing to note with Visio as well: If you’re working with pretty small dimensions then the only way to get really precise is to zoom right in (like 500%), otherwise the whole ‘snap/glue’ thing will kick in based on the page units (probably mm), regardless of whether you’ve switched snap/glue off.

This had bugged me for a while. A lot of sites (including some of the ones I develop) tend to have a fixed width layout these days and some browsers (IE particularly) ‘always’ has a visible scrollbar. This means that the available screen width is constant whether the page scrolls or not.

Firefox on the other hand (and Chrome/Opera/Safari) seem to have this off by default. This of course seems reasonable until you have a fixed width, centred layout that ‘shifts’ when you switch from a non-scrolling to a scrolling page. It’s just a bit off-putting.

Fortunately Firefox is configurable and the following will fix that up for you. (I’m sure the other browsers are capable of something similar but I’m not using them much 🙂 )

Notepad2 is great – no arguments. It was only this morning I actually got around to ‘replacing’ the standard notepad.exe with notepad2.exe. You’d think it was just a simple rename, but Omar Shahine shows the way…

Brad A’s just been highlighting the MSDN Survey to get opinions on how Visual Studio and MSDN documentation works (or doesn’t) for people. I added my 2c and it made me think a little about how I access ‘help’ these days. Here’s what I wrote in the ‘other comments’ (Q 14 I think).

I generally access MSDN content through google (as it’s quicker than accessing the MSDN site, waiting for it to load the TOC, then searching). It’s probably testament to the indexing of the site that a search such as “msdn Path.Combine” will take me straight to the specific page I ‘know’ I’m looking for. I guess this means I’ve got some knowledge of how things are structured and I use that to good effect. In a simple comparison…

Local HelpTyping Path.Combine into VS.NET code editor – selecting the text and hitting F1 came up with a false start (my current machine doesn’t even have the docs installed apart from Enterprise Library 3.1. It did find some less than useful reference from EntLib!). I went to Help options and chose ‘use online first’, and tried again (incidentally I didn’t even realise you could pull in your own list of sites to search (Codezone community) – cool). It chose a different ‘Path property’ first and took about a minute in total to get to the right ‘Path class’.

MSDN Library SiteOpening up the MSDN site (which still feels too heavy in my book – and now curiously like BBC news) and searching for ‘Path.Combine’ took about the same time (1 min). This includes opening the browser, loading up the MSDN home page, searching, clicking the first item in the search results, and loading that page.

Google search on MSDNOpening up Google (admittedly my home page – but I’m looking for speed here) and searching for ‘msdn Path.Combine’ took 20 seconds. The first item in the list was what I wanted so got straight to it. It’s also worth noting that Google’s become a little fat puppy too with all my iGoogle stuff on it, but it’s still way quicker than any of the alternatives.

Just going through some old notepads from previous employment and found a table that I’d come up with to ‘rate’ all the developers in the department (I was a team lead there at the time – I also rated myself and the other team leads). The purpose was to effectively work out who to put where – i.e. what teams. It’s pretty a simple process, and is essentially a straw poll on some high-level KPI’s, but assumes you’re experienced, and ‘pretty good’ yourself, and can recognise/score people objectively and consistently. If you let personal preference get in there then your results mean nothing.

Each person is scored on 4 categories as some may be stronger in different areas. Each score is on a scale of 1-10, and the scores are simply added to get the overall rating ( out of 40). You can obviously make this a percentage etc if you wish. You could also apply an average to scores given by multiple people.

Developer Categories:

Ability. Raw development ability. Can they achieve a technical solution?

Discipline. Their ‘normal’ work practice. Do they take pride in their work? Do they lead others in the processes they follow? how do they work when unsupervised?

Commercial Focus / flexibility, When faced with a deadline or changing scope do they cope? Do they think creatively and work with others to keep things on track, potentially adding commercial compromise into their original design?

Control. How do they work under pressure? Do corners get cut, do they fall to pieces, or do they rise to the occasion?

Team Lead (Technical) Categories:

People leadership. How do they treat their team members? Do they instil confidence and inspire their team to achieve? Does their team ‘like’ them? You have to be careful with the last one, because on its own it shouldn’t give a big score. It’s the icing on the cake rather than the meat in the sandwich!.

Getting Stuff Done. Do they get results? Does their team get results? Do they deliver regardless of obstacles and issues?

Upward Management. How well do they communicate changes, issues etc to managers and stakeholders? Do they ‘sit’ on issues and hope they’ll go away until they ‘blow up’?

When I say ‘best’ – I mean one that allows you to use gmail where you’d otherwise be blocked. This does everything within the one window rather than opening up gmail (and alerting the company web police). This requires a bit of real estate so you might want to create another iGoogle tab with one column.